The researcher was detained and expelled for phone messages expressing “a private opinion” about Trump’s research policies, alarmed French officials said.
The 4-meter Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Mauna Kea is co-owned by France’s National Center for Scientific Research. Credit: Gordon W Myers/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0
A French researcher was denied entry to the United States and expelled from the country for expressing “a personal opinion” on U.S. president Donald Trump’s research policies, the French government said March 19.
France’s research minister, Philippe Baptiste, told the wire agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the researcher, from France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), was traveling to a conference near Houston. “This measure was apparently taken by the American authorities because the researcher’s phone contained exchanges with colleagues and friends in which he expressed a personal opinion on the Trump administration’s research policy,” said Baptiste.
AFP also reports, citing an unnamed source, that the scientist works in the space sector, and that the incident happened on March 9. The researcher and the conference have not been publicly identified, but the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference — a major space science meeting — was held in The Woodlands, just north of Houston, from March 10 to 14.
According to AFP’s sources, the researcher was randomly chosen for a check upon arrival in the U.S., and authorities told the researcher they had found messages “that express hatred towards Trump and can be qualified as terrorism.”
French government officials expressed alarm over the situation. In a report from AFP and Le Monde, Baptiste said, “Freedom of opinion, free research and academic freedom are values that we will continue to proudly uphold. I will defend the right of all French researchers to be faithful to them, while respecting the law.” The French foreign ministry told those outlets that it “deplores this situation” and reiterated France’s commitment to freedom of expression and scientific cooperation.
The incident occurred as space science is being roiled by the actions of Trump’s second administration, which have included a funding freeze, a purge of diversity-related initiatives and research, and an order to reduce the federal scientific workforce. Reports of a potential 50 percent cut to NASA’s science budget prompted The Planetary Society to warn such a cut would be “an extinction-level event” for U.S. space science.
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Other scientific agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and NOAA, have already faced mass layoffs. Some agencies have carried out grant cancellations of targeted research topics, like vaccine hesitancy, and others have reportedly been ordered to make lists of grants for review, targeting certain topics or related keywords, like climate science and marginalized communities.
The incident also comes amid a series of high-profile detentions of foreign nationals and U.S. permanent residents — including several academics — by U.S. immigration officials over alleged visa issues and political views. Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident and green card holder who led protests at Columbia University against Israel’s war in Gaza, was arrested for “actively” — though not “materially” — supporting Hamas, a White House official told Axios. The Trump administration has also threatened to cancel $400 million in government grants and contracts to Columbia unless it complies with a series of demands that would discipline student protestors and restrict future protest activity. Some professors and civil rights groups have denounced the administration’s demands as an attack on free speech and academic freedom.
Baptiste, the French minister, has criticized Trump’s policies as an attack on science while also arguing it is an opportunity to lure U.S.-based scientists to France. On March 18, he declared on X that scientific research will play a key role in Europe’s drive for strategic autonomy, calling research “a priority at a time when the Trump administration is attacking free science and endangering entire sectors of research around the world.”
“Many well-known researchers are already questioning their future in the United States,“ he wrote in a letter to French research institutions, AFP reported March 9. “We would naturally wish to welcome a certain number of them.”
